The Lawsuit Complaint Has Been Filed With The Court

This post is not coming directly from the law firms representing us. It is a personal informational announcement only.

Today marks the first major milestone of a long process we embarked upon over a year ago: The successful filing of a class action lawsuit by the law firms Susman and Godfrey L.L.P. and Izard Nobel L.L.P. The complaint was filed in the District Court of Connecticut today as case # 3:16-cv-00940.

If you have access to the electronic case filing system, you can find the filing here:

The case has to be accepted and certified as a class action by the court. Once the case has been accepted and certified as a class action, then an initial discovery period will commence. As you all know, I have been gathering archival evidence since before March of 2015, prior to announcing that I was considering forming a lawsuit on April 17th, 2015. I will not go into details of what evidence we have, but it is quite extensive. I will add that GAW’s activities, through the various forums and websites, were probably the most and best chronicled in the Crypto Industry, through online archiving websites such as WayBackMachine, Archive.is and Bitcointalk. There are quite literally tens of thousands of “snapshots” of posts and such permanently archived.

To address some of the questions I am anticipating to be posed, I have included a basic Q&A below.

Question: How long of a process will this be?

Answer: There is no way to know how long this will take.

Question: What kind of class action lawsuit is this?

Answer: To the best of my knowledge, this will be an “opt-out” class action, should it be certified as a class action lawsuit by the court. An “opt-out” class action lawsuit allows anyone to withdraw from the “class” or group to pursue their own separate litigation against the defendant(s). If you choose to remain in the class, the final result of the litigation (win or lose), will be final and you will not be able to pursue any subsequent legal action(s) relating to the charges and or allegations listed in the class action lawsuit.

Answer: We have to win the case then, we have to collect on any award. Since this is a “jury trial,” to the best of my knowledge, the jury will determine the amount of the award and any amount for damages. The attorney fees are determined by the court in such matters, but “typically” are around 30% of the value of the award. The attorney fees are withheld from collected award amounts.

Please check back to GAWsuit.com for any updates in the future. If you have ECF access to the court system case documents, you can follow everything there as well. Although this will be a long process, I will endeavor to post whatever the law firms request, as well as post a few lines to keep everyone up to date on any developments which occur.